Black holes are creeping up on us. A space telescope has discovered several black holes in recent years that are much closer than any found before. The closest is just 1,560 light-years away – right in our cosmic back yard.

The black hole is a member of a binary system known as Gaia BH1. Gaia is a European space telescope that’s been looking at more than a billion stars. It’s plotting the distances to those stars with amazing accuracy. And that’s how it found BH1.

Gaia was watching a star that’s a near-twin to the Sun. But the star showed a big “wiggle” – it was being pulled by the gravity of an unseen companion. Calculations showed that the companion is almost 10 times the mass of the Sun, but it produces no energy. That means the companion must be a black hole.

The star and black hole are separated by a little more than the distance from Earth to the Sun. That’s too far for the black hole to pull gas from the star. So the black hole is dormant – it’s not feeding on anything.

Eventually, though, the star will reach the end of its prime phase of life. It will swell to dozens of times its current diameter. That should allow the black hole to roar to life – as it feasts on a dying companion.

Gaia BH1 is in Ophiuchus. The serpent bearer is high in the south at first light. Its outline looks like a giant coffee urn. BH1 is inside the urn – a black hole lurking close to Earth.

Script by Damond Benningfield